Introvert’s paradise: “The Hedgehog” (2009)

21 December 2012

Grading completed. Committees survived. The inevitable debriefings afterward — which often take as much time as the meetings themselves — turn out to be not painful, overly gossipy, or derisive about certain colleagues’ intelligence. I breathe a sigh of relief as I retire to my house for winter break.

Last night I made baked ziti (talk about comfort food! it’s that pinch of nutmeg in the ricotta/ spinach/ artichoke heart mixture) and made holiday cookies for tonight’s neighborhood party. In short, it’s almost like living a normal life again.

And I watched a film. A real film, not the comic pablum my partner has demanded for the past few weeks. Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog is the filmic rendition of Muriel Barbery’s wonderful The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’Élégance du herisson) which I loved reading a couple of years ago. The film has won a pile of awards and deserves every one of them, even as I insist the book is still better.

The story is an introvert’s paradise: a meeting of the minds between a bespeckled, smartypants 11-yr-old named Paloma (Garance de Guillermic) — who despises her bourgeois, clueless family — and Renée (Josiane Balasko), the dowdy, gruff 50-something concierge who manages the apartment building full of rich families. That Paloma sees something in Renée is saying something about the little girl’s powers of observation. Even better, she describes the older woman as much like a hedgehog: prickly on the outside, but inside she is elegant, intelligent, surprising.

With her Japanese pen and ink, Paloma renders her discovery, along with her namesake:

Renée does a great deal to maintain her disguise. She keeps her TV on when she’s likely to be approached by the building’s residents, all the more to confirm their stereotypes about the working-class individuals who take positions as concierges. But secretly she keeps a closed, book-lined study where she retires with a refined cup of tea and sits with her blissed-out cat, Leo.

One day she blows her own cover. Upon being introduced to a new building resident — the white-haired Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa) — she mutters, “Happy families are all alike.” Ozu immediately responds with its companion line from Anna Karenina: “But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Moreover, he guesses that her cat is named for Tolstoy.

Why doesn’t she want them to see who she really is? It seems obvious to those of us who are also hedgehogs. She has worked out a deal with the world, and it allows her to experience a rich inner life. It also reflects her belief in the impermeability of class divisions: no matter how elegant her thoughts, the well-heeled residents of her building will never acknowledge it. Her disguise allows her to blissfully read a difficult, mind-expanding text while eating a perfect bar of dark chocolate.

Her tentative friendship with Paloma changes that. Not to mention the gentle but insistent expressions of interest from Ozu, the new resident.

I still hate the ending, and I’m mixed on the fact that the film emphasizes the perspective of Paloma rather than Renée, but what a delight this film is. Quiet, funny, and full of great female characters — a perfect midwinter treat.

Can you tell? My own delight in hedgehogness is beginning. Ahhh, winter break.

GLORIA SWANSON

2013 film & TV reviewed (with occasional late 2012 films)

Side Effects
House of Cards
The Invisible War
How to Survive a Plague
5 Broken Cameras
The Americans
Blancanieves
Top of the Lake
The Great Gatsby
Stories We Tell
The East
Before Midnight
A Girl and a Gun
The Bridge
The Bling Ring
The Heat
Elysium
In a World...
Orange is the New Black
The Fifth Estate
Enough Said
Populaire
The Wall
The Act of Killing
Twelve Years a Slave